Joe Lieberman Saves the Country

The Democrats look set to abandon the proposed Medicare buy-in. While the rest of the Senate health bill still has problems, its not as bad as what the nation was threatened with two days ago, and for that we can thank Joe Lieberman.

The Medicare buy-in would have been a disaster for reasons well explained by Yuval Levin and James Capretta:

The only plausible reason to put more people in government-run insurance would be cost control, but no one believes the federal government now knows how to control costs sensibly. Liberals say a new insurance bureaucracy should be given the power to use Medicare's price-setting and regulatory structure to cut costs. But that structure has never successfully controlled Medicare spending because price-setting doesn't address volume--and so creates an incentive for more and more spending. Indeed, the Obama administration admits that Medicare's current arbitrary bureaucratic payment systems are a prime source of the inefficiency and inequity throughout the entire health sector, driving up costs for everyone. That's why the president and his team are proposing to set up an independent Medicare commission to straighten out the mess. They know they don't know how to do it and can only hope someone else does. So if Medicare is a big part of the problem, how is its model the solution?

To see the back of the buy-in is a great relief. The provisions in the Senate bill now remain murky. (What a great way to write major legislation!)

What we're heading toward is a bill that creates new insurance exchanges, increases the regulation of insurers, and offers new subsidies - and pays for them mostly through accounting tricks.

It's not good, but it's not what we were threatened with two days ago. Thank you Joe Lieberman.